Watford supporters need to relax and enjoy the ride, says the club's new owner Gino Pozzo

Watford’s new owners, the Pozzo family, have had tough accusations levelled at
them since they acquired the Championship club: that they are creating some
kind of football factory; a conveyor belt of young talent to be sold on; a
finishing school flooded with transient loan players; that Watford will lose
their soul; their academy will wither and die; they are a feeder club.

Welcome party: Czech international Matej Vydra is one of several new faces at WatfordPhoto: GETTY IMAGES

So here is a ‘cut-out-and-keep pledge’ from Gino Pozzo, the son of Giampaolo, who paid £15 million to buy Watford, adding them to Italian side Udinese and the Spanish club Granada.

“If you look at the recent history of Watford the project was: we need to sell all our best players as soon as an offer comes because there weren’t the financial resources to hold on to them,” Gino Pozzo explains. “That meant all the clubs in the Premier League and a lot of clubs in the Championship looked appealing to the player as a better place to go.

“Now the idea is to move the club to a different level where the player himself feels there are very few choices that are better. We want those choices to come down to Barcelona, Real Madrid and so on. The players who leave Udinese are moving to AC Milan, Inter, Juventus or a couple of clubs in Spain and a few clubs in England.”

The notion that, in the future, Watford will be able to resist all-comers apart from Barcelona or Manchester City may raise a few guffaws in Hertfordshire.

But the Pozzos can point to Udinese as indisputable evidence that they are serious, having turned an unstable club yo-yoing between the lower divisions into one challenging for Champions League qualification – and beating Liverpool in the Europa League two Thursdays ago with Gino Pozzo and his father in the Anfield directors’ box.

They are masters of the transfer market and punch above their weight. Now Udinese do only sell their star assets – players such as Alexis Sanchez – to Barcelona.

All well and good. But with 11 loan signings arriving at Vicarage Road from Udinese, what of the local players, the effect it will have on the academy? As pleased as Pozzo is to bring Czech international Matej Vydra and Swiss midfielder Almen Abdi to England he is even happier that Connor Smith, Sean Murray and Tommie Hoban, all academy graduates, have recently signed long-term deals.

“We were surprised that a club that works with young players is not committed to young players,” Pozzo says. “They had one, two-year contracts. Why? It was a mixed message. By changing that idea – to say that the players are here to fully develop to a top, top level – then they will sign longer contracts for the next three or four years. Everyone is starting to understand that.

“Watford fans need to relax and can enjoy this process. There is no cosmic mix to enable us to win. But we understand what works and what we have to do and if we are not performing at the top level it’s because we need more time and there's more work to do.”

So what is the ‘project’? It is a simple formula built on a thorough scouting network, a willingness to buy young talent early – when leading clubs are not always interested – and give it time to develop, which leading clubs can’t always do.

“Fifty per cent is good scouting, 50 per cent is good management,” Pozzo says. “And Watford is the right size because it’s a club which will enable you to develop young players and compete at the highest level without putting too much pressure on them.” Why start with young players? “Because knowing that our financial resources are limited we will have to go another way around to be able to challenge.”

Pozzo accepts that the pace of change, so far, at Watford has been faster than he would have ideally wanted – leading to scepticism that he is simply stockpiling players from Udinese to then sell them on. It is an accusation he refutes. “Maybe we have sent too many, too soon but it’s a case of wanting to move forward quickly.

“I wanted to give a chance to the manager [Gianfranco Zola, who he also brought in] to have the right quality, the resources he needed to make the team competitive.

"We are aware it’s confusing at the beginning but since we are looking at the long term we will have to go through some tough times now to get this together.”

The influx is a one-off. Watford will not have such a large number of loanees arrive again, Pozzo promises - while insisting that most of the players will stay for much longer than their one-year loan period.

“The ideal way to sign a player is a loan with an option to purchase. We have some good young, promising players in the academy and have a strong base to work on - and the fact that we are able to go out of England and sign some top young players is a unique opportunity which will make us much more competitive.”

It is not a three or five-year project - Pozzo will not put a timescale on it - but clearly the aim is to be in the top half of the Premier League.

“We want to be there one day but I’m not going to say ‘we have to be in the Premier League otherwise’. Otherwise nothing. We will just do the best we can do to get there as quickly as possible but without forgetting where we have come from.”